


Hold Together

by transdavenport



Category: The Adventure Zone (Podcast)
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Body Horror, F/M, Gen, Mental Breakdown, Mild Gore, Post-Episode: e067-069 Story and Song Parts 1-3
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-28
Updated: 2017-12-28
Packaged: 2019-02-22 23:03:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,626
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13177065
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/transdavenport/pseuds/transdavenport
Summary: Changing from a lich to a reaper is moving between two incompatible states of existence. It makes sense that there would be an adjustment period.But it didn't make that adjustment period any easier. Especially when that adjustment period involves untethering themselves and spending several days locked in the Eternal Stockade.At least Barry and Lup have Kravitz to see them through it.





	Hold Together

**Author's Note:**

> Huge thanks to Eden [ToTillAGarden](http://archiveofourown.org/users/ToTillAGarden/pseuds/ToTillAGarden), who both came up with this concept and beta read this fic. It wouldn't exist without her. Also a huge thanks to the Taz Writers Discord, which is the only reason I managed to write this at all.
> 
>  
> 
> See the end notes for a more detailed/specific content warning.

Reapers had no need for gold, no need for material goods or currencies. The bounties they retrieved were traded for something else: emotion.

Feeling was so easy for the living and for those who peacefully made their way to the astral plane. But a Reaper, by becoming an extension of the Raven Queen, took a small step toward godhood, necessarily leaving a piece of their mortality behind. The shred of divinity she gave them was a privilege and a gift. But it, as most power does, came with a price.

That price was the ingrained capacity to feel emotion. But it wasn’t lost to them forever. As they gathered bounties, the Raven Queen could return some of that ability. In time, she could give them back some semblance of being mortal.

This was useful for reapers who came from a regular life. They often were not prepared for the heartache of having to collect a distressed soul. But for liches, this posed a far greater problem. Kravitz, of all the reapers in the Raven Queen’s service, knew this all too well.

Kravitz wasn’t necessarily open about his lichdom. Centuries alive and centuries as a reaper had made his decade as a lich a nearly insignificant sliver of his life. While he had become a lich for far different reasons than Barry and Lup, they had two things in common. They all had done it for love, and they had used that love to tether them. Becoming a reaper meant losing that love, and thus losing that tether.

Even if a lich’s tether wasn’t love, their emotional state was directly tied to their vitality, their sense of self, and their ability to hold their essence together. A lich unable to feel is, by the very nature of their existence, a mad lich.

As one of the few reapers who had been a lich, Kravitz was uniquely qualified to see them through it. In preparation, he sectioned off a wing of the Eternal Stockade. It would leave the rest of the prison slightly crowded for the few days it would take, but it was a necessary evil. It was out of the question to allow the inmates to see two future reapers this way. Kravitz chose the deepest part of the stockade, the part with the most secure and isolated cells.

The Raven Queen had decided to conduct the ritual within the Eternal Stockade itself. It was the safest option, allowing for Lup and Barry to be immediately confined. They were given separate cells facing each other, where they would wait for their first bounty. It would need to be a large and isolated case, a case that two untethered liches could be brought in to completely obliterate.

Lup and Barry arrived early. Fear shone in Barry’s eyes, and nerves set Lup’s new body trembling. They were holding hands, and greeted Kravitz warmly before taking a moment to themselves. Kravitz made himself busy adjusting the ritual materials even though he had finalized them hours ago.

Barry hugged Lup, trying to commit this moment to memory. “There’s really no keeping it together with this one, is there?” he asked her, half joking.

Lup laughed softly, taking his face in her hands. “I’ll see you on the other side, babe,” she said, and then she kissed him.

Then came the creeping cold that preceded the arrival of the Raven Queen. Barry and Lup stepped away from the hug but kept their hands intertwined. Lup no longer trembled, and Barry’s fear had been replaced by determination.

A cold breeze whipped through the halls, stirring up goosebumps on the back of Barry’s neck and stirring up Lup’s hair. The Raven Queen came in with the wind and formed from it. She seemed infinitely large, even in the cramped halls of the stockade. She had no clear features, except for a beaked mask and the feathers lining the hem of her dress.

The ritual commenced almost immediately. The Raven Queen, in return for their service and loyalty, blessed them. She then manifested arms and took Lup and Barry’s clasped hands in hers. Something in them started to shift as their goddess released their hands: a fundamental change to their very nature.

Lup knew they had limited time and kissed Barry fiercely. This time, she intended to say goodbye. They both felt the warmth of love begin to fade, and they pulled apart, hurrying to their respective cells. Kravitz sealed them inside, set up a silencing bubble over both cells, and stepped away to wait.

The Raven Queen stayed too, silently watching as the two newest reapers’ forms “stabilized.” True stability was impossible, but they could at least settle into the form they would take for the next few days.

Kravitz knew what they were in for, but he had never seen it happen. Had never seen the way that they both began to tremble. How surprise burst across their features, followed by fear, followed by anger. And then there was nothing at all.

Lup fell apart first, shaking more and more violently until her body _burned_. The fire started at her hands and spread immediately up her arms. It reached her chest and her head and it consumed her, until the ashen remnants of her body fell to the ground in a pile. The ashes themselves then burned, sparking into another flame.

Barry held together slightly longer, but when Lup’s ashes hit the floor, he was gone. Red lightning sparked out of his body, arcing out to reach the walls of the cell. His skin and muscle started to rot, the flesh falling from his bones. Gore dripped from his fingers, sizzling against the divine material of the floor. The lightshow began to fade, swallowed up by the necromantic energy spilling out of his body.

Over the next few hours, Barry stabilized into something that looked undead. Nearly all his flesh had decayed, leaving most of his bones visible. His rib cage filled with an oversized glowing white heart that visibly pulsed with dark energy. Darkness dripped from his eye sockets and his mouth, and it gathered in pools as he stalked through the room. But he didn't move evenly, his steps hitched where a scrap of what looked like denim was caught in the exposed joint of his left knee. Even with the limited mobility in his left, he dropped to a crouch, body language shifting rapidly between humanoid and beastly. And he _snarled_ , pulling his rotted lips back over his teeth.

Lup, on the other hand, was caught in a cycle of overexertion and exhaustion. She would rise from the ashes in a humanoid shape made only of fire. When she moved through the room, she left a trail of flame behind her. But she didn’t move often, frequently curling her body in the corner of the room with her head thrown back and mouth open. Every hour-or-so, her body would flare up, filling the space with too-bright light and a too-warm heat. But it only flared for a second before her body burnt itself out, falling to ash in a heap on the floor. After a minute or two, the ashes would spark, and she would rise again.

Seeing that her new reapers had stabilized somewhat, The Raven Queen turned to Kravitz, nodded, and disappeared. Kravitz locked down the prison wing, and settled in to the guard's alcove at the end of the hallway. He spent the next three days there, silent and out of view. He couldn’t keep away the memories of his time untethered. His week as a formless mass of sound and light. He spent most of it in a haze of confusion and fear. From the way that Lup and Barry were behaving, they seemed to be doing about as well.

Throughout the first day, Lup was frantic. She examined and then attacked every inch of the cell, looking for some weakness, some gap. Looking for a way out. Kravitz couldn’t help but see the similarities to a prison she had been in before: a small, dark room and a fight for consciousness.

Barry was equally thorough, slowly and meticulously examining every inch of stone. Despite his lack of speed, his skeletal body was tense and buzzing with energy. The heart pulsed every few seconds, sending out bursts of sickly white light that clashed unnaturally against Lup’s warm glow.

His years of professional detachment came in handy here. Lup and Barry were his family, but he had to put that aside. The rationalization was simple. They were suffering, but it was necessary. They were suffering, but it would over soon. They were suffering, but there was nothing he could do to help them.

So he did the one thing he could: bear witness. Stand by them even when they could not know him.

On the second day, they were both more subdued. Barry curled up on his side in the center of the room, mosty unmoving. His jaw was in constant motion, like he was trying to talk. Necromantic energy poured out of his mouth and eyes and ribs like a fog, pooling around his body. He was trembling.

Lup sat perfectly still in one corner of the room, but her mouth was almost always open. If there hadn't been a silencing spell, Kravitz knew he would hear her screaming. Every few hours she would rage, throwing herself against the walls and shooting fire in every direction. Then she would flare and die out, leaving just a pile of ash. Then she would reform. She would curl back into her corner and fall into a few stationary cycles of fire and ash.

The third day they were active again, even more so than before. Somehow, that was easier to watch.

Lup’s flare-ups grew brighter, and she stayed ash longer. She tried pulling at her hair and tearing at her limbs, but found she couldn’t get traction on her intangible form. It just set her off more, and she started wildly contorting her body, limbs intersecting in ways they shouldn’t.

Barry took to stalking through his cell, switching back and forth between an animalistic crouch and a humanoid walk. He never stopped moving, never stood still. Death dripped from his mouth and his eyes and his heart, coating his bones and what little flesh he still had. He moved with such ferocity that his body fell apart, only to have the tendrils of necromantic energy drag the pieces back together.

Every few hours, when the calmest parts of their cycles intercepted, they would make eye contact for a moment. Everything would fall completely still. Then Lup would flare again or Barry’s heart would pulse and the stillness would be broken, sending them both back into a frenzy.

The morning of the fourth day, Kravitz was informed that The Raven Queen would finalizing a bounty for them very soon: an underground keep that had been designed to facilitate necromantic rituals. Not only did the necromancers need to be collected, the structure needed to be destroyed as well. Lup and Barry could be let loose to do as much damage as possible. It was an ideal situation.

“ _It is time_ ,” Kravitz heard the voice of the Raven Queen projected into his head. She informed him of the exact location, and left him to complete his work. He stepped forward, into the bubble of the silence spell. He watched the two liches lunge for the bars directly at him, but now he could hear them too. Lup was shrieking, a high-pitched piercing wail. And Barry was growling like an animal, low in the back of his throat and rumbling deep in his ribcage.

“You have a job,” he said to them, the first words they had heard in days. “Destroy _everything_.”

And their doors swung open. They lunged for him, and he stepped aside at the last second, cutting a dimensional tear between them. Their momentum sent them careening into the Prime Material Plane.

Kravitz followed to watch their destruction. He watched Lup’s fire spread through the crypt, hot enough to blacken stone and warp metal. He watched Barry lunge for the necromancers, overwhelming their bodies with the death they had flirted with. Kravitz was surprised to see that they fought _together_. Barry’s strength was against the living, so Lup targeted the environment. She set a wall of fire behind him, to protect his back from ambush. And when a brutish necromancer charged at Lup, Barry struck them down with a powerful bolt of sickly light.

Even mad, even untethered and wild and confused, they fought together.

It was over fast. Every person inside was dead and the building was in shambles. Blood and fire lined the floor and the walls. It was messy, but it worked. And now, with nothing left to destroy, Lup and Barry turned to each other. It was _tentative_ , the first hesitation that Kravitz had seen from them. But before they could truly interact, the world stopped. The Raven Queen stood before them. They had completed a bounty, and they were to be rewarded.

Lup and Barry looked to her, feeling a pull that they did not understand.

The Raven Queen manifested two hands, and placed a hand on each of their foreheads, totally unaffected by Lup’s fire.

This part Kravitz had seen before. Watched his goddess bestow a gift to her reapers. It was like watching someone open the blinds in a dark room: a flood of stimuli, a recoil, and then an overwhelming relief.

Barry and Lup inhaled in unison, and their bodies went rigid, like a current had passed through them. They both tried to draw away from her hand, but divine magic held them against her. After a long moment, the Raven Queen broke the connection, and they dropped to the floor side-by-side.

Kravitz held his breath. The basic capacity for emotion was one thing. But liches needed more than that to hold together, they needed stability and something to connect to. A single bounty could only give them so much. Kravitz hoped it would be enough.

Lup looked over to meet Barry’s empty eye sockets, and then threw herself against him. They clung to each other, blocking out everything else in the world. Her fire was warm against his skin, but it didn’t burn him. And as they held each other, something bright and familiar bloomed inside them: _love_. It wasn’t much, but after days of nothing, it was overwhelming. And, most importantly, it was enough to grab on to.

Barry’s body began to knit itself back together, regrowing the skin and muscle that had rotted away. Lup’s fire started to recede, leaving an unburnt elven body. The feeling of her skin against his was all Barry needed to fully stabilize. He had survived on her memory for years; her presence was enough to pull him back from anything.

As soon as his mouth and throat were fully reformed, he started talking, whispering words that only Lup could hear. He ran his hands across her back and through her hair, using every trick he remembered for how to ground her.

There, wrapped in Barry’s arms, Lup knew she had as much time as she needed. She focused on the weight of his hands on her back and the strength of his shoulder against her face, and after several long moments, Lup pulled herself together. Once the red lightning faded completely, Barry pulled back just enough to look her in the eye, and she kissed him hard. The feeling of love didn’t burn as bright as it had before the ritual, but that would come with time.

Above them, the Raven Queen spoke, “Lup. Barry J. Bluejeans. Welcome to my retinue.”   

 

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading! If you want, my tumblr is [transdavenport](http://www.transdavenport.tumblr.com). Drop by and say hello!
> 
>  
> 
> **More specific content warning:**
> 
> Mental Breakdown: When this idea was posed, the original description of a lich falling apart was "going feral." Its like somewhere between dissociation, resorting to instinct, and an emotional breakdown. If there is a better way to tag this, please let me know lol.
> 
> Mild Gore: The gore in this is necromantic/magical. Basically, Barry's unhinged lich form looks undead and there's descriptions of exactly what that looks like and how he gets that way. 
> 
> Body Horror: Lup and Barry's lich forms aren't technically physical so they do things that wouldn't be possible for a real person (like incorporeal limbs intersecting in odd ways, an undead thing falling apart and reforming, or just looking like a zombie).


End file.
